


Just Call Me Angel, Every Morning

by knaval



Category: Supernatural
Genre: AU, Air Force, Air Force Castiel, Alternate Universe - Supernatural, Community: deancastiel, Dean Winchester - Freeform, Destiel - Freeform, Episode: s06e17 Normal Again, Fighter Pilots, Hunters, Hurt Castiel, M/M, Marine, Marine Dean, Military AU, Nursing Kink, Pilot Castiel, Supernatural AU - Freeform, Supernatural AU: Not Hunters, Wildlife, air force verse, angel - Freeform, castiel - Freeform, castiel novak - Freeform, marine AU, nightingale syndrome, pilot AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-29
Updated: 2013-07-05
Packaged: 2017-12-16 12:56:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/862264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knaval/pseuds/knaval
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>cas is known by the other fighter pilots as "angel", for his particularly excellent flying skills and because the others describe his ability to seek and destroy as a little less than "divine wrath". (the other members of the garrison being the other angels balthazar, anna, gabreil, samadeinel, uriel, etc.)<br/>dean, ex marine now wildlife patrol, is hunting, he sees something, too high up and far away to see what it is, but he shoots anyway, and hits. it falls and when he goes to retrieve it, he finds a a pilot with a tangled up parachute near where the bird fell. he takes the pilot home where he nurses the wounds.<br/>over time even though cas heals up he decides not to call in that he's alive, and continues living with dean, florence nightingale syndrome.<br/>when dean is called back to service and breaks up with cas to protect him from the heartbreak if he ends up KIA, but he doesn't tell cas that he's being called back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Descent

**Author's Note:**

> sorry i know if you're keeping an eye on that other thing i'm writing but this one came out of no where during finals and i want to finish it, it shouldn't be more than five or seven chapters.
> 
> anywho i really like the idea of cas being a fighter pilot gone rogue/missing, but i can't quite decide how dean and sam and co fit into that universe, so if you could suggest anything i'd probably be open to it  
> also i know very little about pilots, airplanes, marines, etc. al i know i know from forest gump. if you have any corrections or knowledge to add, please do.
> 
> plus i have no idea what time period this is in but judging by the plane cas is testing its very modern (because that happened recently) but on the other hand i might throw in the vietnam war as a background thing so sorry if it gets a little confusing

“Angel” they called him, for a number of reasons. In the air force, Castiel Novak was among the best fighter pilots in their division. 

It was Meg who first called him that, before when he still only piloted commercial and passenger planes. At the time he had been a co-pilot, still learning, and Meg was a stewardess aboard the flight. The pilot had gotten up and headed to the back of the plane, and he must have had a heart attack or something because he never came back to the front. Only minutes after they hit turbulence, and seconds later the flying conditions became much less savory. The lights had flickered and the plane was falling out of the sky. 

He’d remembered seizing the controls and doing his best to guide the plane over water. He couldn’t remember exactly what he did, but he remembered the screaming passengers, recalling one young man in particular who had ignored the “fasten seatbelts” light before, clinging to another seat. He remembered that feeling of falling sinking out of his gut as the engine came back on and he pulled the plane into a stable flight. Meg, who had tumbled into the doorway of the cockpit had whispered, “Angel. You’re an Angel.” 

At the time he had been too in shock to argue. He hadn’t seen her again until he enlisted back in the air force, and she had greeted him with a cocky “Hey there, Clarence.” It took him a while to understand the event she was referencing. Eventually he moved to a different division and never saw her again since.

When he thought the nickname had finally died down, Balthazar brought it back, when Samandriel praised his flight skills in the extreme, and his ability to search and destroy as nothing less than “divine wrath”. Castiel had told them to stop, growing wearing of the nickname and all its variations. They never did, because Charlie, their unit supervisor, caught wind of it and then insisted on calling all of them “Charlie’s Angels”, though he didn’t understand why.

He’d been pissed off at his general, Naomi, who had recently reassigned him to return to the field, or, in this case, the skies to fight in the war effort. This was his last assignment before returning to duty. He was testing a plane that was supposed to surpass twice the speed of sound. 

It was a simple task: get up to speed, then eject from the plane and parachute to safety. He would let the plane crash in the ocean where they would recover it later. Whoever had built the plane had managed to make it capable of reaching enormous speeds, with no reasonable way to make it slow down and land quickly enough.

Typical of engineers, he grumbled to himself as he put on his helmet, but accepted the assignment anyway. Charlie said a couple joking words to him as he strapped himself into the plane, but he didn’t bother to listen.

“Hey angel, don’t wait too long to pull the chute this time, alright?” 

He muttered a response, closing the cockpit. He didn’t think he would ever like being called that. Soon enough he was off the runway and up in the air, and pointing the plane towards the coast. In a matter of seconds the difficult part was over, and he was in the air, falling out of the sky.

This was often his most peaceful time of day: he could easily forget all stress or problems from up here. though he was falling in the air the ground was not quite rushing up to meet him. it was the moments like these he really did feel he could fly, the real kind or flying from dreams, not from a plane. He felt himself at peace, watching at how tranquil and harmless, insignificant even, humanity seemed below. It was hard to believe they were at war with one another, causing such unimaginable disasters. Then again, anything is peaceful from 1353 feet.

He reached and pulled the chute, and it unfurled, pulling him back a little in the air. Somehow pulling the chute made it feel a bit less like flying a more like being carried.When he was getting into land something snapped, a clip or a hook he must have forgotten to secure earlier, and he was falling again. Detached by the surreality of the situation, he waited for his life to flash before his eyes, but it never did. 

Only the trees and ground flew up to meet him and kiss him good night. 

For a moment he came to, broken in a tree, his chute tangled up in the wind and branches. He thought somewhat cynically, he would be left here while the garrison made calls inquiring about “angel”, the nickname he would never hear them say again. They would attribute his death (or at least Balthazar would) to his “kamikaze urges” as they often called them. 

Through his closing eyes he saw something crashing through the brush, and he thought in a panic that he would not even have the chance to die peacefully, that a bear or a wolf was coming to eat him. He only saw a man when his eyes flickered open again, the light fading from them fast: moss green eyes that looked back into his own blurred into the foliage and a double barrel shot gun slung over his back, and a look of pure horror and wonder. 

“Son of a bitch,” he murmured, not even to himself as if he couldn’t keep the whisper in him. There was another voice, younger, less gruff, that replied with only the mildest of sarcasm, "You shot an angel.”

There was a question of “Are you hurt?” to which Castiel only mumbled a fraction of a verse he had heard once somewhere:

“No sir, not wounded…but dead.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> more tmmrw i think

The TV was buzzing. He was more or less awake, the way one slowly realizes they are in conscious, like the sleepy Sunday mornings, but according to the news anchor it was Tuesday. 

For a second Cas was sure yesterday had also been a Tuesday, but he discarded the thought, because it surely went down a path of worrying and probable insanity, a path his mind liked less. A little later he found himself listening to birds twittering outside the window, unsure of how he came to that.

In fact, he wasn't even sure where he was. Or entirely why, but that didn't quite matter. His throat was too dry to form words without feeling like cracked clay and there was a sudden pain shooting through his leg.

With a choking hasp he attempted to sit up and reach the leg, find what was wrong, but the rest of him was fairly in pain as well. A searing flare of pain crossed his abdomen every time he tried to reach for his leg to massage it or stretch it out slowly. Pins and needled and static were cradling his arms and choking his fingers and in his writhing he rolled off the couch. A broken, wheedling cry escaped his throat as he craned his neck to look up, the urge to shout overpowering the inability to, when he glimpsed a figure moving outside the window. His shoulder hurt badly from the fall, and his vision was being blinded by tears that did nothing to soothe the pain. His neck cracked too loudly as he scrambled on the hardwood floor for some way to communicate his distress. His hands searched the crude coffee table, knocking the TV remote.

It was a wild thought, but the only idea he had, so he turned the volume all the way up, in hopes that it would be loud enough so that the man outside would hear him. Somewhere his fingers mashed the channel button and changed it to static, the producing a high-pitched electronic screeching that slipped right past his ears with the pursuit of directly causing brain damage. He fell back onto the floor, letting out the breath that he had been holding, tears leaking over the corners of his eyes. He bit his cheek and told himself that to hold off in the pain, and wait for help. For heaven’s sake he couldn’t even bring his leg up to rub the pain away.

Just as he was giving up hope, thinking he would pass out from the pain, the man from outside slid open the door, stumbling at the step as he cringed from the din. Cas closed his eyes, and when he opened them again the man had stumbled over to him, shouting something.

“Charlie horse,” he rasped in response, but the man blinked back at him, and shouted “what” again, glancing quickly to the TV as if that would tell it to shut up. He snatched up the remote and muted it, throwing it aside as he returned his attention to Cas, who clung to it desperately.

“Charlie horse,” he croaked again, clutching at his left leg before he let his head fall back on the floor.

No sooner had he closed his eyes had he felt hands on his leg, pressing and soothing the muscle. Before it had felt like a chord of twisted iron was wrapped between leg muscle and tibia, with nerves attached as it was being pulled too tight, on the verge of snapping and taking the rest of the leg with it, but that feeling was melting away at the touch. Cas found himself returning to the present as his breaths slowed to deep even sighs, his back relaxing into the warped wooden floorboards.


End file.
